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Most genes from the plant-specific family encoding Response to Low Sulphur (LSU)-like proteins are strongly induced in sulphur (S)-deficient conditions. The exact role of these proteins remains unclear; however, some data suggest their importance for plants' adjustment to nutrient deficiency and other environmental stresses. This work established that the regulation of ethylene signalling is a part of plants' response to S deficiency and showed the interaction between UP9C, a tobacco LSU family member, and one of the tobacco isoforms of 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid oxidase (ACO2A). Increase in ethylene level induced by S deficiency does not take place in tobacco plants with UP9C expressed in an antisense orientation. Based on transcriptomics data, this work also demonstrated that the majority of tobacco's response to S deficiency is misregulated in plants expressing UP9C-antisense. A link between response to S deficiency, ethylene sensing, and LSU-like proteins was emphasized by changes in expression of the genes encoding ethylene receptors and F-box proteins specific for the ethylene pathway.

This article explores the status of Uruguayan Sign Language (Lengua de Señas Uruguaya, LSU), in the context of language policies in Uruguay, as well as the specific situation of the Uruguayan Deaf communities.From 2000 to 2008 some language-policy acts (e.g., laws and other official documents) appeared in Uruguay. These statements refer mainly to education, although they also include other areas of society in both their design and their effects.In these official documents LSU is not seen as an attribute of a group of people with a handicap, and LSU speakers are not considered affected by health problems that require special educational treatment. Accordingly, LSU speakers are considered a minority group, as are speakers of Portugués del Uruguay (the Portuguese of Uruguay) or languages of immigrant groups. Thus, in the larger context of a diverse community, LSU is recognized and valued as the language of a minority group who have socially and culturally valuable backgrounds. As Uruguayan citizens, deaf people are entitled to have their community’s natural language considered as one of the Uruguayan population’s native languages.Uruguay does not have an official language explicitly designated by law; Spanish has always been considered as such as a consequence of habit, custom, and its status as the majority language. In fact, until the aforementioned language-policy decisions came about, Spanish was the only language used in education and by the state. In Uruguay the recognition of the existence of minority languages gives LSU a different status and opens the door for further developments that could positively affect the Deaf community.This article analyzes some of the historical processes that brought about in this change. The social visibility of LSU has grown continuously since 1983, both in education and other social sectors (e.g., public and private domains, the media). Since 1987, a bilingual education program for deaf people has been implemented in the primary schools. This program has encountered several difficulties mainly due to the fact that it was created with no connection to a more comprehensive proposal of national language policies, which in turn, left the program in the domain of policies for populations with medical handicaps.This article focuses on language policies in education. However, other aspects of public policies related to the Deaf community and LSU are also considered. The analysis presents cases of conflict and discusses the contradictions among them.Finally, the article explores the processes of standardization and social change that have affected LSU in the last few decades.

In recent years, big data analysis has been widely applied to many research fields including biology, physics, transportation, and material science. Even though the demands for big data migration and big data analysis are dramatically increasing in campus IT infrastructures, there are several technical challenges that need to be addressed. First of all, frequent big data transmission between storage systems in different research groups imposes heavy burdens on a regular campus network. Second, the current campus IT infrastructure is not designed to fully utilize the hardware capacity for big data migration and analysis. Last but not the least, running big data applications on top of large-scale high-performance computing facilities is not straightforward, especially for researchers and engineers in non-IT disciplines. We develop a campus IT cyberinfrastructure for big data migration and analysis, called BIC-LSU, which consists of a task-aware Clos OpenFlow network, high-performance cache storage servers, customized high-performance transfer applications, a light-weight control framework to manipulate existing big data storage systems and job scheduling systems, and a comprehensive social networking-enabled web portal. BIC-LSU achieves 40Gb/s disk-to-disk big data transmission, maintains short average transmission task completion time, enables the convergence of control on commonly deployed storage and job scheduling systems, and enhances easiness of big data analysis with a universal user-friendly interface. BIC-LSU software requires minimum dependencies and has high extensibility. Other research institutes can easily customize and deploy BIC-LSU as an augmented service on their existing IT infrastructures.

Flukes belonging to Sphaeridiotrema are important parasites of waterfowl, and 2 morphologically similar species Sphaeridiotrema globulus and Sphaeridiotrema pseudoglobulus, have been implicated in waterfowl mortality in North America. Cytochrome oxidase I (barcode region) and partial LSU-rDNA sequences from specimens of S. globulus and S. pseudoglobulus, obtained from naturally and experimentally infected hosts from New Jersey and Quebec, respectively, confirmed that these species were distinct. Barcode sequences of the 2 species differed at 92 of 590 nucleotide positions (15.6%) and the translated sequences differed by 13 amino acid residues. Partial LSU-rDNA sequences differed at 29 of 1,208 nucleotide positions (2.4%). Additional barcode sequences from specimens collected from waterfowl in Wisconsin and Minnesota and morphometric data obtained from specimens acquired along the north shore of Lake Superior revealed the presence of S. pseudoglobulus in these areas. Although morphometric data suggested the presence of S. globulus in the Lake Superior sample, it was not found among the specimens sequenced from Wisconsin or Minnesota.

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